The Crows (Pagham-on-Sea #1)

by C.M. Rosens

the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. The evening was dying quickly, a sea mist rolling in from the coast and already creeping up the lanes, and the kitchen with its single naked bulb felt in need of cheering up. Something wasn’t quite right. Carrie was used to the house having a warm, friendly atmosphere, but after the séance the house seemed tense and troubled.

Its eyes flashed with binary code.

“Thanks for the broadband,” Fairwood said, answering that for her.

“There’s a place in town. Some of me ended up there intermittently, they are very careful. Very considerate. Blackberry Antiques.”

“Things are bound to be different when I’ve never... manifested before,”

Maybe she had lost her grip on reality somewhere along the line, with all the stress, and this was all a dreamworld she had constructed for herself, a parallel world of supernatural dangers to make the real-world problems fade away.

Ghosts she could handle, she told herself. It was living people who were the problem.

my life writ large

Fairwood felt her panic. She sensed the house allowing its more aggressive features to take charge.

the anthracite-hard anger of the old coal cellar ripping through her blood.

Not mine! NOT mine... ...NOT HIS...

and this house is mine. Entirely mine. It’s nothing to do with you.”

the upper windows gleaming with malevolence.

She preferred the rooms without furniture, even though they had been robbed of their functionality. They were blank canvases, the house stripped to its bare bones, waiting for something to fill the space and, in the meantime, the pure essence of what a house should be.

nearly punched a vengeful spirit in the face.

“We might have a problem,” Fairwood admitted. “But if she wanted to occupy your form, you’d be vomiting on a three-sixty rotation by now. It’s had all this time to get into your head.” Carrie frowned at the Exorcist reference. “Really? Head spinning round, projectile vomit... all that happens, does it?” Fairwood avoided the question. “It depends.” “Depends on what?!” “How badly it wants to break your neck.”

at the sight of a ghost was pathetic. Little faceless kids with vortexes in their eye sockets freaked her out, apparently.

The omens were so good, in fact, it was like someone wanted him to do it. Ricky was content with that.

Wyrd bið ful aræd. No one could escape their wyrd.

Above him, a pair of magpies chattered, another good sign.

the kind of man Ricky’s cousin Jem Foreman had aspired to be until the Changes put paid to those ambitions with a bad case of gelatinous ooze.

smiled, sweet and dirty.

His pulse quickened with rare enjoyment, watching the man’s jaw slacken first in disbelief, then in horror, his eyes growing wide and glassy.

“You don’t talk like that to the O...

“Himself in the Outside would like someone like you. Family are so bloody irreverent, that’s half the problem with kids today.”

He came closer, the tendrils thirsting for a taste of his spinal fluids. The thick muscular rings of the largest and longest opened and closed, revealing tiny mouths slavering their anaesthetic silver.

He chanted a few choice incantations instead, smearing a triangulation of silver mucus across three trees. Reality began to twist and rip in that spot, perception distorted and rippling. The Others, translucent priests of his grandsire, voracious lovers of the metals found in this plane of existence, were on Their way. Their time here was limited, but it should be time enough to polish off a saloon.

Whistling a jaunty birdcall, Ricky rolled up his sleeves to his elbows, baring his arcane symbol tattoos, and started dragging.

(I hope the Bermuda Triangle of Sussex is a real thing, I hope he drives into oblivion and never comes back)

(what can you feel? What can you see? What can you smell? What things can you taste?)

she tried to shake off the fear, but it jangled in the background like tinnitus.

With a howl of visceral rage, he started to change. Something was sprouting out of the back of his head. Tentacles writhed like snakes, coiling around him like a dark halo.

“Think you’re special, our One and Only indeed, your mother and me ‘ud swap that any day of the week for a nice lot of childer, looked up and down on we are, letting you run wild around the place...”

There, in the back of Ricky Porter’s shaved skull, was a large gaping mouth. Thick white lips like tapeworms opened and closed, silvery mucus strands laced between them. They chomped on the air as Ricky ranted at the woods, a string of colloquialisms and swearwords assaulting the silent trees.

Ricky’s brown eyes burned a dark ruby red. His hands cupped the back of his head, protecting it from her rather than the other way around.

His tattoos spiralled up to his shoulders, two sleeves of symbols exuding a sinister, otherworldly menace.

Ricky considered it for a moment, then burst into a childish giggle, with all the bashful delight of a child surprised with a treat.

fascination wrestling her horror.

that's ricky all over

“I think you should keep your lower ground floor to yourself.”

Ricky’s tendrils snaked out of the back of his head, licking at the air. “Was that... was that an innuendo?” he asked eventually. “It wasn’t great.” “Hell’s bells, you’re not scared of me at all, are you, neighbour? That’s funny.”

“Naun to be afraid of, promise.” (He wouldn’t say that if it was a person, would he?) Ricky’s face was a picture of honesty, but fear snaked up her back.

She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. He wanted her to call him a monster. He was daring her to say it, his whole stance one of aggressive challenge. If this was the council estate where she’d grown up, someone would have taken their top off by now and there’d be real trouble. She shook her head, refusing.

“D’you – d’you want to touch it? No, of course not.” He faced her, blowing out a shaky breath, eyes clouded with something that looked a lot like hope. “Do you?” Carrie blinked. She didn’t, but there was something in the way he’d asked. It was important to him.

we're getting to the we feel kinda bad for him okay, we've been there for awhile he's a weirdly soft boi for all the murdering

His short-cropped hair was soft, like a baby hedgehog’s spines. It was his turn to close his eyes.

“I don’t... I don’t mislike it. We’re not as you’d say, an affectionate family.”

“You won’t bite me, will you?” she asked. He gave a boyish giggle, pulling away. Carrie hesitated, surprised, but continued when he pressed his head back against her hand. “You said ‘you’,” he explained, letting her explore the wide ridges on the back of his skull. “Not ‘it’. Most everyone says ‘it’, like it ain’t a part of me.”

my boi

“Sorry, it’s a defence mechanism, it’s – when I get emotional...”

i had this weird image of a hagfish?

“Don’t go getting ideas,” he warned her. “Don’t you be telling anyone about this, either, you know I’m not meant to get invested.”

It was difficult to ‘tower’ at five foot five, but the ceiling was so low he managed it in fact as well as in his imagination.

(She wasn’t a ruin anymore, either: fully restored, she was, and thirsty for vengeance.)

(Carrie Rickard understood, saw Fairwood for what she was – had seen him, all of him, now, too.)